The C-level doesn’t get it
In a recent post Jeannie Walters she highlighted the 4 challenges facing customer experience practitioners. Which challenge is first in the list? “The C-Level Doesn’t Get It”. She goes on to write:
- “In fact, an overarching (and repeating) lament was “How do I get them to GET IT?””
- “No matter how you say it, it seems to be an ongoing, uphill battle right now.”
The difference between philosophy, strategy and tactics makes all the difference
Now that may not make sense until you get that there is world of difference between philosophy and strategy and tactics. Philosophy is the ground zero of existence – it is your raison d’etre of being. Strategy is simply a course of action that you have selected in order to achieve what matters to you – your higher order objectives. Tactics are simply the how of strategy; tactics do not have to connect up to constitute a strategy and often they do not in many organisations when functions develop their own silo ‘strategies’ that optimise the parts and end up suboptimising the whole.
Now here is the issue: almost all companies have approached customer-centricity/customer experience/customer focus as a strategy (at best) and/or simply tactics to grow revenues and profits. Very few companies have embraced creating superior value for customers as their business philosophy – the reason for existence. And that makes all the difference. The acid test for differentiating between philosophy and strategy is to look for the “in order to”. Think of the early Christians who accepted being eaten by lions rather than renounce their faith: these Christians could have renounced their religion in order to live – the pragmatic business person would say that the sound strategy was to renounce the religion. Starbucks ended up doing that for a while and then Shultz resumed the mantle of CEO to help Starbucks to rediscover its founding philosophy: the customer experience.
What we can learn from Steve Jobs and Apple on this distinction
The points that I want to make are excellently spelled out in a post by James Allworth. Here are the aspects of his post that really speak to me and to the central point that I am making in this post (anything in bold is my work):
Everything — the business, the people — are subservient to the mission: building great products. And rather than listening to, or asking their customers what they wanted; Apple would solve problems customers didn’t know they had with products they didn’t even realize they wanted
When describing his period of exile from Apple — when John Sculley took over — Steve Jobs described one fundamental root cause of Apple’s problems. That was to let profitability outweigh passion: “My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. The products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything.”
When he returned, Jobs completely upended the company. There were thousands of layoffs. Scores of products were killed stone dead. He knew the company had to make money to stay alive, but he transitioned the focus of Apple away from profits. Profit was viewed as necessary, but not sufficient, to justify everything Apple did.
An executive who worked at both Apple and Microsoft described the differences this way: “Microsoft tries to find pockets of unrealized revenue and then figures out what to make. Apple is just the opposite: It thinks of great products, then sells them. Prototypes and demos always come before spreadsheets.”
Similarly, Apple talks a lot about its great people. But make no mistake — they are there only in service of the mission. A former Apple product manager described Apple’s attitude like this: “You have the privilege of working for the company that’s making the coolest products in the world. Shut up and do your job, and you might get to stay.”
Apple hasn’t optimized its organization to maximize profit. Instead, it has made the creation of value for customers its priority. When you do this, the fear of cannibalization or disruption of one’s self just melts away. In fact, when your mission is based around creating customer value, around creating great products, cannibalization and disruption aren’t “bad things” to be avoided. They’re things you actually strive for — because they let you improve the outcome for your customer.
A final word
The hardest thing for ‘experts’ and ‘Tops’ to do is to unlearn – to let go of the accepted wisdom and habits that have been forged over many years. Yet that is exactly what is required today for companies in competitive markets to prosper. And it is certainly required if companies want to excel at the Customer game – create superior value for customers through superior value propositions that make customers lives simpler, easier, richer. Are professional managers up to that task? Here is what James Allworth writes in his post:
“Anyone familiar with Professor Christensen’s work will quickly recognize the same causal mechanism at the heart of the Innovator’s Dilemma: the pursuit of profit. The best professional managers — doing all the right things and following all the best advice — lead their companies all the way to the top of their markets in that pursuit… only to fall straight off the edge of a cliff after getting there.”
What do you think?
